The method of pulse-shape analysis (PSA) for particle identification (PID) was applied to a double-sided silicon strip detector (DSSD) with a strip pitch of 300 {mu}m. We present the results of test measurements with particles from the reactions of a 70 MeV 12C beam impinging on a mylar target. Good separation between protons and alpha particles down to 3 MeV has been obtained when excluding the interstrip events of the DSSD from the analysis.
New charge and current-sensitive preamplifiers coupled to silicon detectors and devoted to studies in nuclear structure and dynamics have been developed and tested. For the first time shapes of current pulses from light charged particles and carbon i
ons are presented. Capabilities for pulse shape discrimination techniques are demonstrated.
Compton scattering is one of the dominant interaction processes in germanium for photons with an energy of around two MeV. If a photon scatters only once inside a germanium detector, the resulting event contains only one electron which normally depos
its its energy within a mm range. Such events are similar to Ge-76 neutrinoless double beta-decay events with just two electrons in the final state. Other photon interactions like pair production or multiple scattering can result in events composed of separated energy deposits. One method to identify the multiple energy deposits is the use of timing information contained in the electrical response of a detector or a segment of a detector. The procedures developed to separate single- and multiple-site events are tested with specially selected event samples provided by an 18-fold segmented prototype germanium detector for Phase II of the GERmanium Detector Array, GERDA. The single Compton scattering, i.e. single-site, events are tagged by coincidently detecting the scattered photon with a second detector positioned at a defined angle. A neural network is trained to separate such events from events which come from multi-site dominated samples. Identification efficiencies of ~80% are achieved for both single- and multi-site events.
Events near the cathode and anode surfaces of a coplanar grid CdZnTe detector are identifiable by means of the interaction depth information encoded in the signal amplitudes. However, the amplitudes cannot be used to identify events near the lateral
surfaces. In this paper a method is described to identify lateral surface events by means of their pulse shapes. Such identification allows for discrimination of surface alpha particle interactions from more penetrating forms of radiation, which is particularly important for rare event searches. The effectiveness of the presented technique in suppressing backgrounds due to alpha contamination in the search for neutrinoless double beta decay with the COBRA experiment is demonstrated.
This work is dedicated to the study of a technique for hadron identification in the TeV momentum range, based on the simultaneous measurement of the energies and of the emission angles of the Transition Radiation (TR) X-rays with respect to the radia
ting particles. A detector setup has been built and tested with particles in a wide range of Lorentz factors (from about $10^3$ to about $4 times 10^4$ crossing different types of radiators. The measured double-differential (in energy and angle) spectra of the TR photons are in a reasonably good agreement with TR simulation predictions.
For the HERA upgrade, the ZEUS experiment has designed and installed a high precision Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) using single sided micro-strip sensors with capacitive charge division. The sensors have a readout pitch of 120 microns, with five inter
mediate strips (20 micron strip pitch). An extensive test program has been carried out at the DESY-II testbeam facility. In this paper we describe the setup developed to test the ZEUS MVD sensors and the results obtained on both irradiated and non-irradiated single sided micro-strip detectors with rectangular and trapezoidal geometries. The performances of the sensors coupled to the readout electronics (HELIX chip, version 2.2) have been studied in detail, achieving a good description by a Monte Carlo simulation. Measurements of the position resolution as a function of the angle of incidence are presented, focusing in particular on the comparison between standard and newly developed reconstruction algorithms.